from NWSA Journal Volume 11, Number 3

"Beyond the Mountains": The Paradox of Women's Place in Appalachian History

BARBARA ELLEN SMITH

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Despite the flourishing of southern women's history during the past two decades, the history of women in Appalachia has only begun to be written. Those who make the attempt must come to terms with implicitly gendered constructions of Appalachia and narratives of regional history that feature men as the determinant actors. Utilizing oral history and family legend, the article argues that women's history in Appalachia, particularly the history of working-class women, requires an approach that looks beyond orthodox sources of data and fields of action to locate women's history-making and the contestations of gender. The resulting feminist historiography challenges conventional conceptions of the region, its history, and who has created both.

Separation Anxiety

I have a faded color photograph of my grandmother, Lelia Belle Fridley Smith. She is standing at the side of the dirt road on the summit of Big Ridge, an ancient mountain that lies on the present border between West Virginia and Virginia, where she and my grandfather settled in 1913. She is gazing east over a panorama of ridges, which are incandescent with fall. Her face is turned away from the camera.

The plain wool scarf, knotted under her chin, her dark sweater and long skirt, the high cheek bones that jut out from the partial profile of her thin face--all mark her as a "mountain woman" from an earlier era. She bore and raised eight children in log cabins and frame houses that never had running water; hoed 50 years of successive plantings of corn on steep mountain hillsides; raised gardens of tomatoes, cabbage, peas, and endless varieties of beans; and used a shotgun to kill the copperheads and rattlesnakes that lurked in the dark corners of the barn and sunned themselves near the blackberry patch. Her dinner table groaned with the bounty that her tending produced.

I remember her as a shy person; even with children, she was quiet to the point of awkwardness. I cannot remember the sound of her voice, or a single word she ever spoke to me. Maybe that is why I have invested her with so many of my own feelings and thoughts. As I gaze at her gazing out over the mountains, I imagine that this rare moment of leisure, when she can enjoy the beauty of the mountains rather than work their soil for a living, brings her pleasure and contentment. As I look at the undulating ridges in front of her, I feel a sweet yearning--for home, for the mountains, for what I imagine her life to have been.

One day I was looking at this picture with my father. He interrupted my sentimental reflections. "She was all the time looking beyond the mountains," he mused to himself. "Big Ridge was like a prison for her; she wanted to see the rest of the world."

This is a cautionary essay about unquiet women. As I try to write women into Appalachian history, insert them in the populist narrative of settling the frontier, fighting the coal operators, and stopping the polluters, the stories of my female ancestors contradict me. Nothing I set down on paper seems authentic; nothing captures their experiences, although they are certainly Appalachian women. There is no established historiographic tradition, no "literature review" in which their lives may be interpreted. They are not coal miners' wives, textile workers, or community activists. Moreover, their distinctly ambivalent relationships with their homeplace and kin contest some of the most common and cherished assumptions about the residents of this region. These women have been dead for anywhere from eight years to more than a century, but they haunt me now.

I know that part of what seems to be my personal writer's block is in fact the monolithic constructs of Appalachia--whether pejorative or romanticized--that have long inhibited vigorous investigations of women's experiences and the dynamics of gender (Banks, Billings, and Tice 1993). Generic "mountaineers," "settlers," and "Appalachians"--most of them implicitly male--crowd the pages of the classic texts on the region.1 Fashioned from Adam's rib, "mountain women" are secondary, entirely compatible with the "mountain men" from whom they are derived. Female agency (other than active support for her mountain community or her mountaineer), sexism, gender trouble--all the basic stuff of women's history--are literally inconceivable. Writing women into the history of Appalachia, then, is a contradiction in terms. Either our constructs of the region or women themselves must succumb, one to the other.

Letting go of my romanticism about Appalachia is hard. The clarity of "them-and-us" historiography (coal operators vs. coal miners, outsiders vs. insiders)--and the associated politics of class antagonism or Appalachian nationalism, take your pick--has explained and generated so much. I spent at least ten years of my life living in, working for, and writing about what seemed to be a class-defined world of coal miners, whose collective spirit was an inspiration to the entire U.S. labor movement. I now realize that that world was also gendered, and that the heady politics of those days was in part about assertions of masculinity. But the grip of those memories is strong, perhaps especially so because a more nuanced and inclusive replacement remains conceptually elusive and politically unrealized.

Psychological explanations for anything other than individual idiosyncracies make me nervous, but I think there is also a sub-conscious element to these romantic sentiments. It is not just for reasons of alliteration that John Denver sings of West Virginia as "mountain mama" rather than mountain papa. For many of us who have lived in Appalachia, the mountains call to us as a mother calls to her children: come home. Our often unarticulated images of the region are deeply comforting, maternal, female. If we grant this Appalachian mother an independent self, she may seek a life beyond domesticity, beyond the mountains, even beyond us. Recognizing the historical agency of Appalachian women is not just conceptually difficult, it's a heartache.

Even as thoughts such as these make me balk at writing any more, I recall my Aunt Mildred:

Mildred was my grandmother's first daughter, born in 1908 before her parents moved from Rich Patch, Virginia, up to Big Ridge. The next girl in the family was five years younger, so for several years Mildred was her mother's sole apprentice in the feminine terrain of the kitchen. Whether it was the disruption of that early move, the closeness to her mother, or other factors, Mildred also yearned to see the world beyond Big Ridge. For a relatively uneducated (her father felt that educating girls was a waste of time, as they were destined for domesticity), white female coming of age on a remote and modest farm in the 1920s, exploring other worlds on her own was unfeasible, perhaps even unthinkable.

At sixteen, Mildred married for the first time to a man who promised to find a job outside the mountains and take her with him. Although he broke that promise, what came to matter more was that he also beat her up. Mildred fled back to her parents' home on Big Ridge, (an early-day "battered women's shelter,") where my grandfather, in a story that is sometimes told as the heroic climax of this family legend, sent Mildred's husband crashing through the porch railing when he came to claim her.

She tried again, this time marrying a man who did indeed take her out of the Allegheny Mountains--to the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio. He, too, was abusive, and once again she returned to Big Ridge, pregnant with her fifth child. Because Mildred had no way to support her children on her own, and her parents were unable to support their younger children and grandchildren simultaneously in the context of the Great Depression (and my grandmother's bout with tuberculosis), for an extended time she lost her other four children to their fathers. In spirit, she lost one of them forever: when Mildred died in 1991, her oldest son, who blamed her for abandoning him as a child to his harsh and violent father, refused to attend her funeral.

Mildred married a third time to a gentle man who made no pretense of wanting to leave the mountains. He worked in the kitchen at the posh Greenbrier Hotel. Until Alzheimer's disease also induced him to fits of violence, they lived together in a small, dark, spotless house beside the railroad tracks in White Sulphur Springs, in the mountains of West Virginia about twenty miles from Big Ridge.

Aunt Mildred's painful story eats away at my placid, romanticized images of "mountain women." Her oppressive circumstances also challenge my alternative repertoire of activist women: those who went on strike, laid down in front of bulldozers, and mouthed off to county commissioners and economic developers. New questions, heretofore unthinkable, begin to form. How have the contexts--and constructs--of our beloved mountains and romanticized mountaineers constrained women's dreams, talents, and possibilities? What did women such as my grandmother and aunt see beyond the mountains, and what did those imagined worlds inspire them to create in Appalachia? What negotiations, rebellions, and reconciliations did women pursue, especially with men whose actions dominate written records and became defined as Appalachian history? If most women in previous eras were, like my Aunt Mildred, seemingly robbed of autonomous action by economic dependence, did they nonetheless participate in the "making of Appalachia"? Did they "make their own history"? What does that mean?

The Fraternity of the Frontier

There are additional difficulties, both practical and ideological, in conceptualizing women's historical agency. Focused on those whose actions and status were considered most important, i.e., men, most archival collections and other records institutionalize the mesmerizing logic of patriarchy as historical truth. Census protocols (until quite recently) define all husband-wife families as male-controlled, the only social possibility. Records from institutional sources such as churches primarily document the actions of formal leaders, who are overwhelmingly men. Employment records for industries such as coal and timber detail the circumstances of their all-male work forces. Elections and legislative documents record the votes of the enfranchised, i.e., primarily white men. To remember that women even existed, much less that their presence and activities may have had any historical significance, requires a contrary and vigilant consciousness.

Although these problems are endemic to women's history, there are additional obstacles to the development of women's history in Appalachia.2 Proponents of Appalachian studies, which developed in fertile relationship with social movements for the abolition of strip mining, union democracy, and other issues, reclaimed the Appalachian past from condescension and obscurity, and found in it instead populist resistance heroes, virtually all male. The chief protagonist in the history of Appalachia, at least as it's been written for the past 30 years, is a valiant working-class (or small landholding) man, who struggles against planters, land speculators, coal operators, condescending missionaries, local colorists, and disparaging academics to assert his dignity and power. The implicit metanarrative of Appalachian historiography is thus deeply gendered: "mountaineers" (and their academic advocates) act to defend the female Appalachia--symbol of land, hearth, class interests, and personal integrity--from assault. Not surprisingly, what have been demarcated as the great eras in Appalachian history--the surges of frontier settlement, the Civil War, industrialization--also feature men and their instrumental actions as determinant. Whether clearing land, fighting as soldiers, or mining coal, various forms of masculine exertion are the defining activities selected to give name to and evoke the spirit of these broad sweeps of time.

Consider, for example, the frontier. This historiographic landscape rings with axes, reeks of male sweat, and is populated with intrepid frontiersmen who by force of muscle subdue the land, the Indians, and each other.3 Few passages evoke this history qua machismo better than Ralph Mann's description of Rees Bowen:

First comer Rees Bowen was remembered as a literally larger-than-life figure, not as an aristocrat, but as an archetypical pioneer. A member of a westering landed family, he knew the way to prestige on the frontier. As first on the scene, he could claim Maiden Spring if he could hold it. A tall, muscular man, he was able, it was said, to let his wife stand on his hand and hold her at arm's length. Combining strength, industry, and purpose, he cleared land, multiplied his horses and cattle, and raised an unusually large, strong log house, stockading it in 1773 when the Shawnees threatened. (1995, 135)

Lest this seem an unfair example of intentional hyperbole, consider the more straightforward account by John Inscoe (1997), one of the premier historians of antebellum Appalachia. In his commentary on a recent film set in the Appalachian frontier, Inscoe automatically and unthinkingly (and that is, of course, the point) praises what are in fact his own "remarkably accurate" depictions of the frontier as an all-male society. (Women do appear in the film, including one as a lead character.) The absurdity of historiography-as-usual made me burst out laughing as I read the passage below, as other members of the animal kingdom get bit parts but human females never make it into the picture:

Equally impressive is the careful--and I think remarkably accurate--recreation of this remote frontier society. The Carolina highlanders depicted in the film are neither backwoods hillbillies nor "coonskin cap boys." They are hunters and farmers, most of them family men eking out modest livings on small landholdings. But they do not do so alone. [Yes! He is going to introduce women, I naively thought on reading this for the first time.] Far from frontier loners enduring isolated existences amidst an all-consuming wilderness, these early highlanders make up a thriving society driven by trade and commerce. There is a constant sense of movement throughout the film, as livestock and poultry crowd the roads as much as do people and wagons. . . . (206)

In the face of such casual obliteration, it is not surprising that the only antebellum women able to command much attention, apparently either then or now, tend to have committed heinous criminal acts, extreme gender transgressions, or both. Mary Anglin's (1995) recapitulation of the story of Frankie Silvers, who murdered her philandering husband and was hanged for it in 1833, is a case in point.

My own family legends betray related forms of sexism, though thankfully with less murder in their plots. The "origin story" of the Smith family holds that a woman (often unnamed) showed up one day with her young children in the early-nineteenth century in the Nichols Knob vicinity of Potts Mountain, one of the long, high backbones in the ridge-and-valley segment of Appalachian Virginia. In one version she is pregnant, and the baby to whom she soon gives birth is my great-great-grandfather. In any case, the point is that she is of questionable moral character because she is without a man and her (presumably bastard) children are fatherless.

This story is not told with harshness (she is, after all, our ancestor), but with a self-deprecating humor that conveys some of the most important values and self-representations of the Smiths: we are egalitarian, humble folk; low-born. For my purposes here, however, what is significant is that my great-great-great-grandmother's courage and fortitude (a woman traveling alone with small children and few possessions over the Appalachian Mountains in the early-nineteenth century seems nothing short of heroic to me) are erased by the focus on her moral repute. To their credit (and my indebtedness), my father and aunt resolved last summer to learn more about this shadowy person. What they discovered not only contests the masculine imagery of the frontier, but also suggests intriguing possibilities about the nature of women's agency in Appalachian history more generally (Smith, J. 1998).

Nancy Crockett was born in the latter half of the eighteenth century, probably in Virginia, in an as yet unknown year. She married Thomas Smith in 1791 and settled with him in Botetourt County, Virginia, which at the time was an undivided sprawl of high, forested ridges and fertile bottom lands to the west of the Valley of Virginia. Nancy and Thomas had four children, including my great-great-grandfather John Crockett Smith, before Thomas died of unrecorded causes in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

A widow with four children, Nancy Crockett Smith came to the attention of the Botetourt County authorities who, in the winter of 1808, sought on two occasions to remove her children from her care. An unaffiliated, landless female with no visible means of support, she was by definition an "unfit" mother and, along with her children, a potential liability for the county. Twice the local authorities recommended that her children be "bound over" to properly patriarchal households where they would supposedly be cared for in exchange for their labor. Her youngest children were Rhoda, a baby, James, a toddler of two or three, and my great-great-grandfather John, who was four years old.

Nancy Crockett Smith apparently resolved to protect her children from "binding," potentially a form of servitude, by fleeing north along the great ridges of the Appalachians. She first sought refuge in the household of one John Bowen (possibly a kinsman, but this is uncertain), who agreed to act as guardian of her oldest daughter Elizabeth and to keep her baby girl Rhoda. She then traveled on with her two remaining children over the mountain to John Bowen's son's home on upper Still Run, on the north side of Nichols Knob, where her own sons became part of his household. James Smith, her youngest son, died there at an early age. John lived on to become a farmer and millwright on Blue Spring Run, a nearby stream that flows east from the Knob. One can only speculate whether his predisposition to accommodate fugitives in his home was the product of his own early history, but he spent much of the Civil War in Castle Thunder prison in Richmond, charged with harboring a federal deserter.

The fate of his mother Nancy is unknown.

Nancy Crockett Smith did not chop down virgin forests, lay claim to acres of fertile farmland, build log stockades, or even establish an independent household. Those possibilities were not available to her as a widow with four children and few material resources in early-nineteenth-century Virginia. Nonetheless she "settled the frontier." Her marginal and desperate status renders the manifold historical consequences of her fugitive actions both unintended and all the more remarkable. She founded a new clan of people, who eventually established schools, churches, roads, and networks of community, in the backcountry of Appalachia. Among the many ironies of her legacy is that her bid for her children's freedom also placed her female descendants in remote mountains that some would later perceive as confining.

What does her story mean for a feminist historiography of Appalachia?

If history comprises the processes whereby people enact, defend, contest, and transform existing social arrangements, then we are all participants. Even the most ostracized and contained--the leper in quarantine, the prisoner on death row, the impoverished nineteenth-century Appalachian woman who is a legal non-entity--are part of the action. From this perspective, one task for feminist historiography, which some scholars thankfully have already begun, is to elaborate how women engaged in socially necessary activities--wage labor, farming, commerce, and so on--embedded, indeed hidden, within a gendered division of labor that allocated different tasks and status to women and men. Less frequently explored, but equally important, is the entire landscape of culture, family, and community life, where the constraints, tensions, and intrigues of gender were central to all human activities and relationships.

Such an expansive approach is necessary if we are both to restore a past to women and recognize the centrality of gender in everyone's history; however, it sidesteps the question of agency, or the "making" of history. Even if we all take part in history, are our parts equal? Historical agency has come to connote the capacity to exert influence--however local, modest, or incremental--over the inertia of received circumstance and the coercion of established relations of power. In the context of Appalachia, scholars have tended to define agency in economic terms, whether as class struggle (Corbin 1981; Lewis 1987; Trotter 1990), populist contestations over slavery, industrialization, and other issues of the day (Eller 1982; Inscoe 1989), or, more benignly, as the initiative to make a living in new contexts (Dunn 1988; Mann 1995).

Nancy Crockett Smith's story exposes the conceptual narrowness and elitism of an understanding of historical agency that focuses so exclusively on men and their economic "self-actualization." In the account above, she is allowed to enter history as an agent only when she contests the patriarchal terms of her own existence--as a woman, a widow, and a mother--and acts as a man. Even as such actions make a place for her in history, they also place her outside the bounds of propriety and the law. Most other women remain outside history, only slightly further removed from it than those men--the landless, the tenant, the slave, the unemployed--who also fail to meet the standard for economic agency in their day.

What I am questioning here are not the materialist premises of so much of Appalachian historiography. Rather, it is the narrowness of what has been defined as material, the exclusivity of who is considered an economic, and therefore historical, actor, and the limitations in prevailing concepts of agency that so constrict the scope of inquiry. Gender is also a profoundly economic relationship; it involves women's and men's differential access to and control over material resources, and it is deeply implicated in class relations (Smith, B. 1998). Gender is also a site of power, contestation, and history-making. It is a measure of lower-class women's "subaltern" status that their gender subversions, negotiations, and rebellions have often been covert, indirect, and unrecorded--at least by academics. As James C. Scott (1990, 136, xii) observes: "If subordinate groups have typically won a reputation for subtlety--a subtlety their superiors often regard as cunning and deception--this is surely because their vulnerability has rarely permitted them the luxury of direct confrontation. . . . Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a 'hidden transcript' that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant."

The history of women in Appalachia will not be discovered exclusively, perhaps even primarily, in the official documents of institutions, even those that they founded and shaped. Nor may women necessarily be located at "historic" events (a battle or strike, for example) that they influenced. Gender is a profoundly material relationship, but its bargaining table is often in the kitchen. The historical agency of Appalachian women, especially working-class women, is to be found as much in jokes, "old wives' tales," and fugitive actions as in the public events and records of conventional history. The paradoxical quest for Appalachian women's history takes us beyond established historiography, beyond heroic constructs of the region, to a landscape of action and meaning so familiar that we routinely fail to recognize its significance.

The Hidden Transcript in Aunt Mildred's Hat

Ellen Fridley, my great-aunt, served for three decades as the midwife and lay healer for the community on Big Ridge. She delivered babies, "laid out" the bodies of the dead, and ministered to the ill. She learned from physicians who sometimes attended the same patients, and she called on them when a situation exceeded her knowledge or pharmacopeia. Her skills and willingness to assist anyone who needed her help, regardless of their ability to pay, brought requests and respect from people all over the mountain. Even when men from the tough-talking, hard-drinking, church-avoiding Rainey clan arrived at her home in the middle of the night, leading an extra horse so that she could ride back with them and deliver a baby, it was nothing but "yes, ma'am" and "thank you." Her niece and assistant Mildred looked on in amazement as these hard-bitten men deferentially escorted Aunt Ellen onto her horse. Aunt Ellen was not without her own forms of power.

Ellen Fridley was a central figure in the economic and cultural flowering of Big Ridge during the 1910s and 1920s. An entrepreneur, she ran the Big Ridge Supply Company, lodged in a small building near her home, where mountain residents could buy gum, tobacco, groceries, clothes, kerosene, and other items. She often accepted butter, chickens, eggs, and home produce in barter, which her husband later peddled in White Sulphur Springs. Her economic ties with a larger world of commerce were complemented by a literate and intellectual curiosity. She read newspapers, ordered books through the mail, and apprised herself of events of the day. Like her sister-in-law Lelia Belle, Ellen had "modernist" leanings; she believed that scientific and cultural innovations elsewhere could benefit her family and her community, and should be embraced.

Hezekiah Fridley, Ellen's husband, was in the same respects almost the opposite of his wife. Illiterate, with a resentful suspicion of book learning, Hezekiah was also deeply superstitious. When their last child, a daughter, was born with a severe but surgically correctable cleft palate, the stage was set for a protracted battle between these headstrong individuals and their different points of view. Ellen resolved that her daughter would not go through life with her speech and physical appearance impaired by a condition she knew could be improved. Hezekiah, skeptical that any human being could or should correct what God and nature had ordained, steadfastly refused to permit an operation. Aunt Ellen prevailed. I don't know how, but I suspect that her independent sources of income had something to do with her ability to carry on with her own plans.

I interrupt this story for a brief academic commentary. Aunt Ellen's modern inclinations endorse the anti-isolationist emphasis in recent interpretations of Appalachia. Historians increasingly suggest that, from the first moments of permanent European settlement, ties of commerce, property ownership, politics, and information bound even the most inaccessible mountain communities to wider social and economic networks (Inscoe 1989; Pudup, Billings, and Waller 1995; Dunaway 1996). One implication of this approach is that "modernization" was not simply imposed on insulated mountaineers by missionaries, educators, and industrialists from "outside," but was a process that evolved in part through long-established relationships.

There is also a gendered aspect to Aunt Ellen's modernism, for her commercial activities had a particular impact on the well being of women. Her store made it possible for women to turn their home-based products (butter, chickens, eggs, garden produce) into manufactured goods that decorated their houses and alleviated their work loads. This is not to endow her with an incipient feminism, but merely to point out that many of the small but essential household items--soap, candles, thread, clothing--secured through barter or cash exchange replaced extremely labor-intensive products made by women and children. These gendered motives and outcomes remind me of present-day "back-to-the-landers" who invariably seem to install running water and washing machines when they begin having children. Although it is typically men who haul out the wrenches and lay in the pipes, behind their household modernization often stands a dissatisfied and overworked woman. Perhaps mothers necessitate invention.

There is yet a deeper level at which gender worked through Aunt Ellen's commerce. Her store functioned as a funnel for the goods produced by women's labor on Big Ridge, which were then peddled by Uncle Hez to other women in White Sulphur Springs. Hez did an especially brisk business in the Bottom, an African American neighborhood. When the cash that Ellen anticipated from his weekly transactions consistently began coming up short, her math confirmed what rumor had already whispered: that women who lacked cash traded sex with her husband to pay for their food. So were women's labors to feed themselves and their families bound together in a network of exchange and exploitation mediated (and concealed, he no doubt hoped) by a man.

For most women on Big Ridge, such academic analyses of Ellen Fridley's commerce are hardly the point of her legacy. The stories that are told and re-told with relish, almost always by women, are not of her business acumen or even her medical skills, but of her ingenious manipulation of Uncle Hez. Her many efforts to curtail his sexual exploits are among the favorites (which I will reluctantly leave for another time). In this Appalachian counterpart to the Br'er Rabbit stories, the presumably weaker protagonist always outwits her spouse. Even in the most sorrowful or powerless circumstances, she prevails. These are the hidden transcripts of gender:

When Ruth was one year old, she and her mother boarded the train together in White Sulphur, bound on the C&O line for Huntington, West Virginia. Through her contacts with physicians, Ellen had located a surgeon trained to carry out the operation on Ruth's cleft palate. Uncle Hez railed against her decision and predicted dire outcomes from the surgery. Ellen ignored him, although his wrathful predictions increased her own anxiety about the operation and its consequences for Ruth's health.

It was an all-day trip, and Ellen entertained her restless daughter with stories, games, and the extraordinary sights of the New River gorge through which they traveled. They spent their last night together away from home, boarding with strangers in Huntington.

Ruth died on the operating table the next day. The doctors speculated later that her tiny body housed a weak heart that could not withstand the operation. Ellen Fridley returned to Big Ridge alone, riding all day on the train with her daughter in a coffin in the baggage car.

Enraged with a grief that was compounded by self-righteousness, for months Uncle Hez upbraided Aunt Ellen for her foolish and fatal decision. Ellen first tried argument, then silence and avoidance, but he kept on. Submerged by her own grief and guilt, and well aware of his stubbornness, Ellen knew she must find a way to stop his tirades.

Uncle Hez's greatest weakness was his superstitious nature. One night, many months after Ruth's death, when he had fallen asleep, Aunt Ellen quietly brought a small lantern and set it on the floor next to their bed. After settling herself back under the covers, she reached over and turned up the wick. Shadows flickered through the rafters as she dangled her hand around the chimney. Presently Uncle Hez awoke.

"Ellen! Ellen, wake up!" She feigned sleep. "Ellen, wake up, there's a haint [ghost]!"

"Hez, what are you shaking me for?," she asked drowsily. "I don't see no haint."

"Ellen, it's there! Yonder in the corner!"

Ellen moved her long fingers and the ghost danced. "Hez, get on back to sleep. You're seeing things." Ellen slowly turned down the lantern, and the house darkened. Hez grumbled and tossed, then fell into a fitful sleep.

The next day, unnerved by the ghost and irritable from his restless sleep, Uncle Hez continued to rail against Aunt Ellen for sending Ruth to her grave. That night, Ellen once again set the lantern next to their bed. When the light began to flicker in the same corner, Hez woke up.

"Ellen! Ellen!"

"Oh, Hez," she said sleepily. "Let me rest."

"Open your eyes, Ellen! It's over yonder!"

Ellen peered around the room, then turned to Hez. "I don't see no haint, Hez. I reckon that means it's come for you." She soon turned down the lantern, but her words had reinforced what Uncle Hez already feared. He lay in watchful terror most of the night.

By the third night, Uncle Hez was so frightened of the nocturnal visitations that he could scarcely fall asleep. It was the wee hours of morning before his snoring finally persuaded Aunt Ellen that he slept. She turned up the wick.

"It's the haint! Wake up, Ellen, it's back!"

Ellen feigned sleep. He poked her with his elbow and shouted in her ear: "Wake up!"

"Oh, Hez, can't nobody sleep with you having all these haints."

"It's there! Over yonder in the corner! Same place for three nights!"

Aunt Ellen finally delivered her punch line: "Well, Hez, if it is a haint, it must be Ruth's. You won't let her rest in peace, fussing about her all the time."

Uncle Hez was silent. Aunt Ellen made the ghost dance just a few more times for effect, then she lowered the wick.

Ever after that night, Uncle Hez was afraid to speak of Ruth at all. The ghostly visits ceased, and the lantern stayed on the shelf. As for Ruth, Uncle Hez and Aunt Ellen separately offered up their silent prayers for her peaceful slumber beneath the sheltering trees of Big Ridge.

Overt feminism was rarely the mode by which women on Big Ridge asserted themselves. Their tactics were often indirect, surreptitious, and, on many occasions, humorous. Through her commerce and midwifery, Ellen Fridley attained community visibility and social power, pushing against the constraints of womanhood in ways that conventional historiography would deem significant. But backstage, in a far less recognized arena, she also operated, using subterfuge and manipulation to contain the inequities of gender and set limits on male privilege, self-importance, and authority.

Such strategies of gender defiance are not simply individual, symbolic, or folkloric. They are historically embedded and agentic. Ellen Fridley and Mildred Smith created and embodied the enfranchised, "new woman" of the 1920s. Through their actions and decisions, they brought her home to Big Ridge. She was a woman who refused to be battered, despite the terrible cost; who divorced twice, even though "no one in the family had ever done such a thing" (even once); who sought medical innovations and new commodities produced elsewhere to benefit her family and community; and who maneuvered with her wits and her sexuality to claim influence within her household.

If, as many have suggested, human history is not in the end about the received circumstances into which people are born, but about what we do with those circumstances, then the analysis of hidden transcripts and related modes of self-assertion can provide a wide and clarifying window into some of the most profound questions in Appalachian history. A basic tenet of this approach is that repression and exploitation ineluctably produce a response (Scott 1990). This is not to romanticize the slave or slavery, the battered woman or patriarchy, the unemployed coal miner or class exploitation. It is to suggest that those who, in the official documents of history, emerge at most as longsuffering victims, nonetheless practice their own willful humanity.

It is the summer of 1973, and I am living with Aunt Mildred and her third husband, Uncle James, in the old one-room schoolhouse on Big Ridge. My aunts have fixed up the high-ceilinged, white frame building as a "camp," or cabin, which sets on a knoll across from Antioch Church, now used only once a year, for homecomings. Across the dirt road lies an abandoned homestead, overgrown with dewberry vines and blackberry brambles and bordered by a ramshackle split-rail fence, where Uncle Hez and Aunt Ellen settled some 60 years ago.

Over the course of the summer, I learn that Aunt Mildred is a far more complex and occasionally irritating person than the story of her violent and disappointing marriages might suggest. For one thing, unlike my other aunts, she does not seem particularly interested in preparing a tantalizing abundance of food for every meal, though she is willing to direct my own fumbling efforts at biscuits, cobbler, and cornbread. For another, she displays a most un-Smith-like tendency to pursue her own desires and needs. I soon realize that our living arrangement was orchestrated by her sisters, who probably grew tired of her languid habits in the kitchen long ago and figure that she will at least cook for me and her husband, if only to avoid eating my tasteless brown rice and half-cooked vegetables.

I spend my days tramping the woods with Uncle James, who pokes the forest floor with his walking stick looking for mountain tea, ginseng, and snakes, but sometimes cannot remember his way back to the schoolhouse at the end of the day. In the long summer evenings, after we have tamped down the fire in the Modern Maid cookstove and washed the dishes in pans of heated water, Aunt Mildred settles deep in her faded armchair and tells me stories about the hey day of Big Ridge. She talks about Aunt Ellen, and the time she sashayed alone in her one piece of finery down the streets of White Sulphur, twirling an umbrella and flirting with men, all to regain her husband's attentions. She tells me about my grandmother, who emerges from silence and my own lost memories as a far more feisty and determined individual than I had ever known. The stories Aunt Mildred tells are mostly about other people, especially Aunt Ellen, but they are all, of course, also about herself. Even the most painful or humiliating episode in these women's lives ends at least in irony, if not laughter. It begins to dawn on me that my aunts had other reasons for wanting me to live with her.

One night, Aunt Estelle and Uncle Henry invite us down for a "picture show." They live on one of the earliest homesteads on Big Ridge, "the old Lewis place," settled during the Civil War by a white deserter and a black family of escaping slaves. Across the dirt road from their house is the cemetery where Ruth, and now her parents, are buried.

The pictures that Aunt Estelle has collected are a mixture of prints, some nearly 100 years old, and more recent slides. In the older pictures, our ancestors stare out at me with dour intensity. Giles Montgomery Smith, my great-grandfather, has the eyes of a madman and is especially scary looking. I become sleepy and confused through all the explanations of granddaddy's cousin who married one of the Humphreys, not the Humphries, who was kin to grandma on the Fridley side, etc. Impatient and young, I want to see someone I can recognize. Maybe there will even be a picture of me, I think, ridiculously. "Let's look at the slides," I say.

We turn out the lights and start up the slide projector. And there, in one of the first pictures to appear on the wobbly screen, is a youthful Aunt Mildred. She is unmistakable. Although it is a group picture of a Sunday School class, it might as well have been an individual portrait. Standing at the end of a line of demure-looking women in white summer frocks, she looks saucily at the camera. She seems larger than everyone else, and it is only in part because she has leaned her willowy body, flattered by a polka-dot dress and black hat, out toward the photographer. This hat is no granny sunbonnet. It isn't even a small and unobtrusive church-going hat. This is a rakish, wide-brimmed, New-York-bound boat of a hat.

I gasp. She is so beautiful. I think of her violent husbands, estranged children, and thwarted dreams. I think of Aunt Ellen and her anguish over Ruth. I think of my grandmother, and I wonder how many other women on this mountain may have wanted to live other lives, in other places. I am of a youthful generation and privileged class that assume we are supposed to get what we want out of life, and that if we don't it is automatically a tragedy.

Aunt Mildred's chuckling voice cuts through my melancholic reflections. She is gazing appreciatively at her own image on the screen. "Look at that hat!," she commands with glee. "Wasn't I a fine-looking thing?"

She looks with kindness down at me, sitting at her feet on the floor, dressed in a different garb of defiance: my brother's cast-off shirt, Army surplus pants, and clunky boots, a feminist uniform of the 1970s. Then she throws back her curly, white-haired head. And she laughs.


Barbara Ellen Smith is director of the Center for Research on Women and associate professor of sociology at the University of Memphis. For the past 25 years she has been an activist and writer on issues involving labor, racial justice, and women in Appalachia and the South. Her most recent book is Neither Separate Nor Equal: Women, Race, and Class in the South (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1999), which she edited. She is also chair of the board of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, TN. Correspondence should be sent to Smith at Center for Research on Women, Clement Hall 339, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152; bsmith2@memphis.edu

Notes

1. For diverse approaches that nonetheless share this gender-blindness, see, for example, Eller (1982), Lewis, Johnson, and Askins (1978), and Shapiro (1978). In literature on the coalfields, the reference to male subjects (coal miners) tends to be more explicit. However, the gendered character of miners' experiences (and of the discourse about them) tends to be similarly evaded. See, for example, Corbin (1981), Seltzer (1985), Lewis (1987), Smith, B. (1987), and Trotter (1990). This critique of earlier work is also a self-criticism.

2. A strong feminist voice in Appalachian studies is developing, but its absence for so long requires explanation. Surely the influence and appeal of the central coalfields, where the class struggles of male coal miners dominated the political landscape throughout the 1970s, have been important factors. (See Smith, B. 1998) In addition, the second wave women's movement was not strong in the region, though that of course also requires explanation. A thorough analysis of this inattention to gender and women could reveal much about the discourse of Appalachian studies, as well as the relationship between gender and class in Appalachia.

3. There are, as always, exceptions. Durwood Dunn's (1988) attention to female as well as male settlers in Cades Cove, and especially his descriptions of the indomitable Lucretia Oliver, is particularly notable.

References

Anglin, Mary K. 1995. "Lives on the Margin: Rediscovering the Women of Antebellum Western North Carolina." In Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. M.B. Pudup, D. Billings, and A. Waller, 185-209. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Banks, Alan, Dwight Billings, and Karen Tice. 1993. "Appalachian Studies, Resistance, and Postmodernism." In Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, ed. S. Fisher, 283-301. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Corbin, David Alan. 1981. Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Dunaway, Wilma. 1996. The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Dunn, Durwood. 1988. Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818-1937. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Eller, Ron. 1982. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Inscoe, John. 1997. "Hollywood Does Antebellum Appalachia and Gets It (half) Right. 2. Slavery, Freedom, Frontier: The Historical Perspective." Appalachian Journal 24(2): 204-15.

---. 1989. Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Lewis, Helen, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins, eds. 1978. Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press.

Lewis, Ronald L. 1987. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Mann, Ralph. 1995. "Diversity in the Antebellum Appalachian South: Four Farm Communities in Tazewell County, Virginia." In Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, 132-62. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Pudup, Mary Beth, Dwight Billings, and Altina Waller, eds. 1995. Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Seltzer, Curtis. 1985. Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Shapiro, Henry. 1978. Appalachia on Our Mind. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Smith, Barbara Ellen. 1987. Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

---. 1998. "Walk-Ons in the Third Act: The Role of Women in Appalachian Historiography." Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 4(1):5-28.

Smith, Joseph. 1998. "Summary of Findings Regarding the Ancestry of John Crockett Smith and Susannah Harless Smith Based on Research Done by Fran Craddock, Joe Smith and Others from 1993 to 1998." Photocopy in author's possession.

Trotter, Joe W., Jr. 1990. Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-1932. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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